Martirio e rappresaglia nell’Arabia meridionale dei secoli V e VI: uno sguardo sinottico tra fonti islamiche e cristiane

This article deals with the intertextual relations between Eastern Christian hagiographical traditions of Late antiquity on one hand, and some texts belonging to the early Islamic religious literature on the other. In the last two centuries, European orientalistic literature has considered the Islamic literature as a basin where past religious traditions have been converged and passively copied. In this contribution I would stress the original activity of early Muslim writers who reworked Eastern Christian legends in order to build a new religious identity as well as to consolidate new boundaries. Accordingly, the key-figure used by wirters of pre-modern Islam is the fighter-horseman- monk, a kind of sign and symbol of the “common semiotic koine” within the monotheistic tradition (Sizgorich). In this study, I will chose two narrative cycles: some texts relating to the instauration of Christianity in South Arabia, and the Martyrdom of Aretha and his companions in Nağrān (BHG 166). In both cases it is possible to point out mutual borrowings from one tradition to the other. In the former cycle, the Sīra nabawiyya by Ibn Hišām presents two texts whose sources have to be found in Christian hagiography of both Syriac and Geez (old classical Ethiopic) literature. In the latter, a reciprocal interference in both Christian-Muslim directions has been pointed out.